News, 2/26/2018

Finnish museum brilliantly leverages the art of Donald Duck

“Excuse me, where are the Donald Duck paintings?” The staffers in the galleries of Helsinki’s Ateneum Art Museum have heard this question thousands of times over a space of several months. Another thing they’ve often heard is, “I’ve never been to a museum before, but I came to see the ducks.”

Ateneum negotiated with the National Gallery of Duckburg – or so the story goes – to gain the privilege of exhibiting more than a dozen pieces that show remarkable similarities to classic Finnish artworks in Ateneum’s own collection. The National Gallery of Duckburg exhibition ends on February 25, 2018, but we couldn’t let its runaway success just fade away; our slideshow (below) contains a selection of paintings for anyone who couldn’t make it to Helsinki to see them.